Chickening Out

So yesterday I butchered a chicken.

Actually, I cleaned a few chickens- I didn’t do any killing because it requires a firm hand and a steady stroke, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get all the way through the jugular quickly enough to prevent the chicken from too much pain.

Are you grossed out yet? I hope not.

I’ve been a vegetarian for about 9 years. And this week I ate a piece of chicken. It’s been an ongoing internal debate for months now- or possibly years- ever since I started spending time with people who raise chickens. And with chickens. And then started thinking to myself- well, why not, really? If my primary reason for not eating meat is that I disagree with the conventional method of raising and slaughtering animals, and here I have found a community of people who raise chickens in a sustainable, humane way, what are my reasons for not eating meat?

I really didn’t have any. I’ve never been much for the “its cute, so you can’t eat it,” sort of argument, because while animals are very cute and deserve to live long happy lives, there’s a line in there somewhere. Lions certainly aren’t contemplating whether or not the zebras are too cute to eat.

But clearly part of what makes us human is our ability to reason about things, sometimes endlessly. And so I decided that if I was going to eat a chicken, I wanted to meet the chicken. And I wanted to witness every aspect of its life, from birth to death, and let the chicken tell me if it was really ok. I spent hours with these chickens- held them, pet them, watched them run around in their outdoor pen, eating bugs and watermelons and grains. I found that chickens aren’t very talkative creatures.

When the time came to watch the chickens die, I was afraid I’d be grossed out. I was afraid I would throw up or something- and I was very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. But my friend told me something very wise: no one has to be good at everything. And that includes killing. I’m very good at making clothes. He is not. He’s very good at raising and killing chickens. I’d probably be ok with the raising- but there is no reason for me to be ashamed that when it came down to it I didn’t actually cut their throats.

I did, however, clean the carcasses, pulling out guts with my bare hands, plucking the last few feathers, cutting off the feet and the head- oh yeah, I did all that. And all while standing around chit chatting with neighbors and friends from my co-op and their kids, who were fascinated by watching us pull out perfect little hearts and lungs and livers, and wanted to pick them up and feel them and see how they worked. At first it was weird- but within a few minutes we were comparing techniques and laughing and joking, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to stand there yanking on chicken guts.

However, when it finally came to eating a piece of chicken, I still hesitated- I was kind of afraid I just wouldn’t like it, and all of this would be for nothing. My friends roasted a chicken, and I sat down with four adults and two children. Having sat down at the “kids” end of the table, the adults sort of forgot that I was having a significant moment, and left me to my thoughts while I stared at the piece of chicken on my fork, wondering if it was the chicken I had sat and held for a good half hour a few weeks ago. The six year old next to me finally asked what I was doing. “I’m thinking about this chicken, and how it lived, and whether it had a good life, and thanking it for giving its life so I could eat it,” I said.

“Of course it had a good life,” she said, “I got to pet it.” She then proceeded to devour an entire chicken wing.

And so I ate the chicken. I like the dark meat better, by the way.

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Pick 5

As they do over on facebook, I figured I would do a pick five for recycling. Only it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to post on facebook my five least favorite things to find in the recycling, so… here they are.

5 Least Favorite Things to Find in the Recycling
1. Pasta Salad
2. Coffee cups (with coffee)
3. Rotten fruit
4. Rita’s cups (with Rita’s)
5. Sandwiches

5 Least Favorite Recycling Smells
1. Stale beer
2. V8 juice
3. Rotten fruit
4. Milk, ice cream or yoghurt after several days
5. Cola (especially after it gets in your clothes)

5 Awesome Things to Find in the Recycling
In order of frequency, with 1 being the most frequent
1. Books you’ve always wanted
2. Things you’ve been looking for (milk crates, furniture, vases)
3. Money (it happens)
4. Empty and rinsed bottles and cans
5. Treasure maps

5 Dangers of Recycling
1. Broken glass
2. Falling in the dumpster
3. Getting hit in the head (by doors and recycling bin lids)
4. Mosquito bites and bee stings
5. Back strain (heavy bags of paper)

5 Awesome Numbers
1. 24,576.6 lbs (12.3 tons)- the amount of recycling collected at Washington College in the 2008-09 school year
2. 95%- the amount related air pollution cut by making cans from recycled aluminum
3. 102- the number of trees saved by campus recycling during the 2008-09 school year
4. ¼- the amount of energy saved by recycling cardboard from the energy used to manufacture it
5. 1874- the year of the nation’s first curbside recycling- in Baltimore, MD

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Spring Break '09

I awoke to the sound of rain softly beating against the side of the tent. The sides of the canvas were damp, but I barely felt it, wrapped tightly in my sleeping bag. Somewhere outside I could hear a vulture rustling it’s wings, most likely eyeing the camp, trying to determine if it was safe to approach. I glanced up at the tent window, and saw that the sun had not yet risen. The sky was still a solid, deep gray.

Eventually the sun would crest the edge of the beach, washing the sky with a light pink haze, edged in brilliant red. By the time it had moved beyond the tops of the palms, we would all be awake, perched on the picnic tables eating bagels and slathering on sunscreen before the day’s activities. It’s not a normal college schedule, rising at dawn and falling asleep shortly after dark, but when the days are filled with volunteering, canoeing, swimming, and hiking, it’s best to get an early start, and by the time the sun sinks below the ocean and the moon has risen to bathe the campsite in pearly white, all we can think about is sleep.


Each day brought a new adventure: whether meeting a panther face to face (literally), and learning that panthers, cougars, and mountain lions are in fact the same species (who knew?), or clearing brush to keep a trail clear for other explorers, each day of volunteering exposed students to the ins and outs of the Everglades ecosystems, especially with an up close look at what doesn’t belong- the tigers, snakes, monkeys and other exotic animals at the Everglades Outpost, rescued after escaping from research facilities or being abandoned by people who thought keeping a Bengal tiger for a pet would be a good idea, or the invasive species that plague the parks and choke out native plants.

Students also entered the Everglades themselves, getting as close as possible to the water while canoeing through mangrove tunnels, feet away from alligators, wading birds, and the other denizens of the swamps and waterways that make up the 1.5 million acres of the Everglades National Park, where we spent most of our time. A night hike during the full moon brought us within range of a group of feeding alligators, animals which look like nothing so much as baking logs during the day, but which come out in numbers in the cool of night to thrash through the swamp, snapping their jaws on unfortunate fish with a sound like a trunk closing. It is a rare group that gets to see a “feeding frenzy”- and a sight not quickly forgotten.

On another day we were able to get even closer to the wildlife, spending an afternoon on a beach in Key Largo, resting before the long drive back to Maryland, soaking in the sun, and snorkeling in the protected bay, which sheltered numerous fish and crabs, which could be seen hiding among the roots of the mangrove trees. The sky remained a perfect, incandescent blue throughout our trip- the temperature a perfect 81∞ each day, and bliss to our group, having just come from the melting snows and blustering winds in Maryland. An afternoon spent lying under the shade of a palm, listening to the waves brush softly against the beach, and watching wisps of cloud skirt across the sky, drifting in and out of sleep, was a perfect conclusion to a week spent out-of-doors, as near to the land as possible, without cell phones (no reception) and only about two watches between the lot of us, telling time by the angle of the sun and our own growing familiarity with the Florida skies.

The Everglades are a lesson in ecology. The climate is somewhat different from what we have here in Maryland: only two seasons, wet and dry. We were fortunate to visit during the dry season, when there are fewer bugs, almost no rain, and a higher likelihood of seeing animals, as they are bunched together around the few remaining large pools of water. The Everglades itself is actually a very, very slow moving river- 60 miles wide and 100 miles long, twice as wide as the Bay but half as long. During the wet season, May through November, the area floods to form acres of wetlands and swamp, which serve an important role in buffering Florida from hurricanes and flooding. Much of the damage done to Florida by storm systems in past years has been the result of the destruction of many of the wetlands that once absorbed the flooding caused by storms. The park itself is protected under a number of preservation efforts- but this doesn’t account for the encroaching development that threatens coastal regions elsewhere in Florida and around the world.

On the last night before we returned to Maryland, we came back to our campsite tired and sunburned, to find the site surprisingly dark. All week the moon had been so bright we had rarely needed lanterns to find our way around, but on this night, the moon hadn’t yet risen, and we could barely see our tents as we stumbled out of the vans. A few steps out of the parking lot, however, and we all stopped dead in our tracks. Without the moon, the sky was overflowing with more stars than most of us had seen in years, or in some cases, ever. The Milky Way was clearly visible, as were thousands upon thousands of stars we could only imagine even in a place with as little light pollution as the Eastern Shore. A group of us, without any planning or discussion, sprawled out in the grass to look up at the breathtaking span, sharing stories about constellations we could identify, and making up our own when we ran out of ones we knew. One girl pointed out that the light coming to us so strongly had been traveling for thousands of years to get here- and in many cases, the stars that originally gave off the light had at this point burned out. Looking up at the sky, which wrapped around us in an enormous dome unobstructed by any building or even trees, it was easy to feel small, a tiny speck in a vast expanse, and at the same time immensely connected to it all: to the stars, and the palms, and the cry of a heron somewhere in the night; to the alligators, and the flowing river where it met the sea within view of our campsite, and to one another, lying on our backs in the grass.

View photos of our trip here.

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